Three ways to cultivate your community at work

We are all working so hard to identify and garden communities among our clients or websites users that we often overlook the community closest to us – our colleagues. 

This is mad. And it misses a great opportunity to learn.

If your colleagues already have a strong network within their business sector, they will create very strong communities when they move online.

Each and every community will develop differently. Do not miss a bit of it.

You need observe how each community behaves, learn from their actions and pass on best practice.

Here are three ways to cultivate you community at work.

1 Set up a Twitter profile just for them.

The people I learn from/follow on my Twitter profile are exclusively social/new media. I find it really distracting when anyone makes any comments outside the subject.

Listening to my colleagues – working across 15 different business sectors – is impossible. Yet I want and need to listen to and learn from their conversations.

I have set up a new Twitter profile where I follow all my colleagues on Twitter.

I’m only just getting my head around. I get to see what kinds of Tweets they are sending out and can give permission feedback (ie only after asking if they want it). I circulate good Tweets by colleagues to spread best practice. And I reTweet one or two of the most appropriate Tweets from my social/new media profile. I congratulate them on their good ideas.

They certainly do not have to follow me – they might be so focused on their own communities that they might find me a distraction.

2 Ask you colleagues to write a guest post on your blog

Many of my colleagues have taken only one or two steps into social media – perhaps a fresh look at their Facebook profile and a stab at Twitter. A blog is just one step too far.

Ask them to write a guest post for you. What is their experience of social media so far - remember they are real practitioners not early adopters so their experience is key to further developments? There will be no shortage of subjects. 

Get them to add links. Ask them to add a list. Encourage them to choose the picture.

Once you have pushed the “publish” button, show them the traffic on a daily basis. Send them links to blogs that have picked up on their post. Show them how to Tweet out a link to their guest post on their Twitter.

Watch them as they experience the excitement of blogging from the safety of your own blog.

3 Introduce your colleagues to the new contacts you meet

Inevitably you build new contacts through social media. They are different from you colleagues at work coming from outside the usual recruitment silos of our businesses.

Both sides have much to learn from eachother: the early adopters begin to understand some of the slowness of traditional companies; the corporates begin to see that the early adopters are actually just like them.

Invite them into the office. Ask them to give a talk to your colleagues. Suggest a work placement that they might find useful.

Picture credit: adele.turner

The 10 questions I ask myself before I publish any blog post

I used to publish my blog posts immediately after writing them.

Now I write, save, reconsider, save, rewrite, save, sleep, wake…oh, and then publish. The more time I build in before publishing a post, the more visitors I get to this blog.

Ask yourself these questions.

1 Do you have the space and time to reflect deeply on your post?

Tip: Make notes of ideas during the week. If blogging is not your full time job, write only during the weekend.

2 Is your post easy to read or daunting to a first time reader?

Tip: Try organising your posts in different ways. I started this post with bullet points, then experimented with numbers and have ended up with questions/tips.

3 Are all those words or even sentences necessary?

Tip: Reread your post and ask whether you can cut out a word or whole sentences. Go back and cut out more. And more.

4 What combination of typography makes it easier to read?

Tip: Even with a basic blog platform like this I can use bold, normal or italic, bullet points or numbers, quotations and pictures. Experiment until it is easier to read.

5 What will the post actually look like when published?

Tip: Click on preview. Have a really close look at what your post looks like down to how the text fits round the picture.

6 Are you the only person in the world with perfect spelling?

Tip: Use the spell check. I have no doubt that someone can find spelling and grammar mistakes in this post. But, without spell check, you’re doomed.

7 Does this post need to be published right now?

Tip: If it is a breaking story, get on with it. But if there is no good answer to this question, literally sleep on it.

8 Have you thought of the implication of every word you have written?

Tip: You really need to be sensitive to every type of reader. You want opinionated commenters but not those who are outraged by a misunderstanding.

9 Do you know how to publish a post using your blog’s timer?

Tip: This post was published just as the traffic to this blog takes off. As important, I can leave the blog’s timer to take care of the post while I get to work.

10 Do you see your post as a one-off or part of that week’s schedule?

Tip: Even if it is a one-off in content, think of your post as part of a weekly programme. How does it fit in?

What questions do you ask yourself before publishing a post?

If you think your followers/community on Twitter would be interested in this post, show them your value by reTweeting it to them!

Photo credit: Xurble

A list of counterintuitive behaviour that will improve your use of the web

Traditional media people – journalists, marketers, editors - are just like other professionals. They do the same things in print and via emails year after year because of intuition.

Success came about by

• hoarding the content
• broadcasting to the users
• expecting a response
• trying to please everyone
• assuming everything was read
• not engaging with the competitors

The more you get to use the web, the more you realise it works the opposite way.

• the more you focus on a niche than a whole community, the quicker your traffic will rise
• the more you comment on other people’s sites, the more comments your site will receive back (even if they are not from the same people)
• the more annoyed you are that you still have no comments, the harder still you need to try
• the more information you contribute to your community, the more you will be able to develop those relationships
• the more frustrated you become with the lack of response from your community, the less response you will receive
• the more open you are in your networks (even if there are traditional competitors), the more information you will get back 
• the more you link to other sites, the more sites will link to you (even if they are not the same sites)
• the more questions you answer on Twitter, the more others will answer yours
• the more specific, even lengthy, your keyword phrase can be, the more qualified will be those who find your content
• the more you can make your navigation like your online competitors, the more easily people will find what they want on your own site
• the more quickly your subscribers increase, the more quickly they will decline
• the more you block the wrong people from following you on Twitter, the faster your followers will grow
• the more rude a comment is on your blog, the more you should presume that the commentator did not mean it

Can you think of  other web behaviour that is counterintuitive?

If you think your followers/community on Twitter would be interested in this post, show them your value by reTweeting it to them!

Photo credit: Payton Chung

Five more online skills you must master BEFORE you start a blog

Earlier this week, I launched the first of my two part campaign to encourage people to master five online skills before they start a blog. I promised five more online skills. So here they are.

Once again, I make suggestions for both journalists who already write for websites but also for people who do not have access to a website.

Research

In the previous post, I encouraged you to identify a community.

You still need to find out all you can about that it through research.

You might find that your chosen community is overwhelmed with good blogs. What it actually wants is a closed group on a social network where it can discuss business issues. Without research, you might overlook the social network your community is already in. Why set up a LinkedIn group, for example, if your community is obsessed with Facebook.

If you are a journalist, a few questions on your website is one way to collect information.

If you do not have a website, why not use a social network? Join LinkedIn and write up your profile. Then join a group in a sector closest to your potential blogging community. Participate in the discussion areas. Why not ask a few questions yourself?

You don’t need a blog to do research.

Categories

One of the key questions in the research of your community for your blog might be “what information do you need?”.

Once you have the results, you could write a list of subjects in which your community is interested.

Whooa! Don’t let it become too long. Just as your blog will attract more users the more closely it focuses on your community, so those users will be more likely to return if you can keep the content within a narrow range.

Why not try to keep it within ten core subject areas?

Whether you are a journalist of not, visit some blogs and notice how the best blogs use few categories.

You don’t need a blog to work out the core subject areas for your community.

RSS feeds

Bloggers are, by the nature of the media they use, more likely to be web-savvy. Many of them sign up for RSS rather than email subscriptions. Whether you understand RSS feeds or not, find out before you start your blog.

Sign up to Google Reader. Sign up to some RSS subscriptions. Learn to manage you daily reading through RSS feeds.

You don’t need a blog to make yourself familiar with RSS feeds.

Optimise

Have you noticed how certain parts of this post have links, in bold,  to other posts on this blog ? If you click through, do you notice how the same words appear in the original post’s headline? You need to do the same.

If you are a journalist, you have started to put links between stories, one of the five online skills to master before you start a blog that I mentioned in part one of this campaign. Try to use the same words as the previous post’s headline. It’s awkward at first – perhaps you need to rewrite the previous post’s headline – but you will get used to it. Over time, you will begin to notice how you write headlines ready for use as links in future posts.

If you do not write for a website, sign up to Twitter as soon as possible. The discipline of writing meaningful messages in 140 characters will improve the brevity and directness of your writing – all good practice for your future blog.

You don’t need a blog to learn how to write so that your content is more easily found.

Analyse

You’re going to be so proud of your blog when it takes off. But you are only going to be able to assess the success if you have learnt to understand the quantity and quality of your traffic. One way to do this is to get to know Alexa. It shows the traffic and ranking of any site.

If you are a journalist writing for a website, why not input your own site. Then input your competitors!

If you do not have a website you can access, why not log in your favourite site and see how it compares to others that you view.

You don’t need a blog to learn how to analyse traffic.

Are there an other online skills that you think are essential to acquire before starting a blog?

If you think your followers/community on Twitter would be interested in this post, show them your value by reTweeting it to them!

Photo credit: Leonard Low

Five online skills you must master BEFORE you start a blog

 When did people mistake blogging as a platform from which to mouth off their opinions?

 As a result of being asked to read one too many this week, I am launching a new two-part campaign. Five online skills you must master BEFORE you start a blog – community, commenting, connectivity, collaboration and content. The second part – Five more online skills you must master BEFORE you start a blog – will be published next.

Make sure you’ve mastered the Five Cs before you start a blog. When you do at last set up that blog, it will be so much better for the effort.

(I should know. I launched without a thought.)

If you are a journalist, you can use your website for practice.

If you aren’t a journalist and don’t have access to a website, I’ve added simple alternatives.

Don’t let me down.

1 Community

Have you identified a community for which to write? Can you refine your community even more? For example, if it is a blog for the commercial property sector, why not focus on agents. And why not those specialising in office rentals?

Go further still. Why not only the bosses?

Write for the commercial property sector and few of them will know your blog is for them (one post out of 10 might be of interest).

Write for the bosses of commercial property agencies specialising in office rentals and, by god, they will soon know that is worth coming back for more (since every post will be for them).

Now you’ve identified your target readers, use Twitter to help you develop skills to cultivate that community.

You don’t need a blog to spot a potential online community and start cultivating it.

2 Commenting

Your blog won’t attract comments unless you make the effort to comment on other blogs. Go and comment on newspaper websites and blogs in your sector. There are several ways to find blog about your chosen subject when starting from scratch.

Remember, the etiquette is to “join in the conversation”. So don’t barge in with a new argument. Use your experience and knowledge to take on the blogger’s subject.

When asked for a web address, leave the URL of an article from your website that adds something to the discussion. Don’t worry if the article is a few months old as long as it still brings something to the conversation.

Or, if you don’t have a website,  leave the URL of your LinkedIn profile if it shows you bring professional expertise to the debate.

You don’t need a blog to learn how to comment on websites.

3 Connectivity

You don’t look at the navigation when you book a flight online. You click from one page to another, ending in a successful conclusion by actions embedded in a page. 

The future readers of your blog will want to do the same, reading one post and clicking through to another. So, stop worrying about the navigation and start making links between your stories or other content on your site. Set yourself a goal of having made one link to a previous story by the second paragraph of every story you write.

If you don’t write for a website, go and comment on a blog that allows you to put in a link to another website. Better still, one that allows you to do so with simple HTML so you leave a word linked to a site (like this) rather than an ugly URL (like this http://johnwelsh.wordpress.com/about-you/).

You don’t need a blog to learn about connectivity between articles.

4 Collaboration

You would be amazed how much the web will help you with what you are doing. You can start with one question and receive so many responses that you soon have another idea for an article. But you will only receive that reward if you yourself have helped others.

Go and help people’s initiatives using collaboration to build communities. Add a name to someone building a list. Contribute to Wikipedia. Sign a petition.

You don’t need a blog to benefit from online collaboration.

5 Content

In print, only an editor gives his or her opinion in the leader. Everything else is supposed to be content that helps the reader. A blog should be no different.

Think what information might be useful for your community. Practise finding core information on other sites. Turn it into lists of tips.

If you are a journalist, try adding a list of tips with links to useful sites as the penultimate paragraph of  the stories you write online. 

If you don’t have a website, go and leave your tips on other people’s blogs or forums. See how people respond.

You don’t need a blog to learn how to create great online content.

In part two I will be writing about another five more online skills you must master before you start a blog. What skills do you think people need before setting up a blog?

If you think your followers/community on Twitter would be interested in this post, show them your value by reTweeting it to them!

 Photo credit:crosathorian

What to do when your social media is frustrating you

We’ve all done it. We’ve been so frustrated by the lack of traditional response to our social media activity, we’ve gone back to our old ways.

• We’ve written what we thought was the best-blog-post-ever and then no one read it.
• We’ve encouraged someone to follow us on Twitter. When they didn’t, we emailed them directly.
• We’ve made the most intelligent comment on a celebrity blog and the following 100 comments entirely ignore our stream of thought.
• Worse still, the original high-profile author acknowledges specific people for their comments except you.
• We use social media as a vehicle to blast out traditional marketing messages at work.

But

You cannot broadcast.

You cannot push.

You can only talk to your community when you have built one up.

So here are tips for what to do when your social media is frustrating you

1. Don’t worry. We’ve all been there before. Your community will be forgiving for any one-off breaks in etiquette. If isn’t forgiving, it’s not worth having.
2. Do something else for a while. You cannot become an expert in all of social media at one time. Instead, focus on one or two activities for a while, then move on to some others, then come back to the first. You will find how much better you are after a break.
3. Do something for someone else. Have you ever reTweeted one of your follower’s Tweets? Have you ever pushed a link to another post other than your own? Have you helped explain something as simple as an RSS feed to a newcomer? Have you asked someone to guest post on your blog? You can only begin to expect back when you have given a lot.
4. Do nothing. The web and the blogosphere are noisy places. But what is louder than a shout? A whisper.

Photo credit: misocrazy

Six steps to get started in social media

I am often asked by my colleagues and people on Tweets how to START in the world of social media, particularly blogging. So here’s my six step plan

1. I would follow (ie sign up for their email alerted postings) blogs by former journalists so Jeff Jarvis (also Guardian columnist),  Craig Stolz, Mark Potts. Note how people comment on postings, how many comment, the etiquette of commenting (join the debate, leave something intriguing, not a plea to read your posting) and where some of the comments lead you to – bloggers you might never have heard of. Remember the key act of blogging is the posting of a comment on another person’s blog and drawing the traffic back to your site or blog. But, before you set up that blog, practise commenting on other blogs.
2. Read some of the leading social media marketers such as Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang, David Armano. There is a huge wave of companies using social media to market themselves in the US. These bloggers cover the phenomenon just as the first splash hits the UK. 
3. Read a good blog about blogging so you get to understand the culture –  Darren Rowse’s Problogger. 
4. Set up a Twitter account and start following people like Jay Rosen, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan (find them on my Twitter where I FOLLOW them). When their Tweets start coming through on your account, click through the links that they send out. Some will be of no interest but some will take you to some amazing places – leaders of social media are actually sharing their thoughts and views with you. Could old media ever have done such a thing? 
5. Set up a LinkedIn or Facebook account, if you have not already done so. Note how different they both are to use, in terms of contacts found and content used. Open a Flickr account and start sending photos to it from your mobile phone – it spews out an email address just for you.  Start a YouTube account and save some favourite videos. All these things are really easy once you get your head into working out how to do it. Go to Google and see how high up your name appears, riding the social media bounce. 
6. Over a very short period, all this activity will all start coming together and you will feel the need to set up a FriendFeed to aggregate it all in one place. And, only at this point, will you be ready to set up a blog having thought really hard about your subject, nicely focused and firmly anchored in your specialism.

Will you let me know how it goes or, better still, show me through social media – a comment on my blog linking back to yours, or a comment on my FriendFeed  – how you are progressing?

Web 2.0 achievements: Matt Parsons’ blog achieves 600 hits in an hour

Congratulations to my colleague Matt Parsons and his blog. Let me allow him to tell you in his own words of his success.

I actually notched up 600 hits this week in one hour after correcting a Wired blog on Ryanair! left my blog URL – and whoooosh!

Matt’s blog Journeys through Travel has only been going for four or five weeks and yet he has already exceeded 3,000 hits and been named “Growing Blog” by WordPress.

Other Web 2.0 achievements – TTG Twitters

These Digital Times named today as one of WordPress’ “Growing Blogs”

 

 

Screengrab from WordPress earlier this evening

How delightful. Tonight I discovered that this blog has been named one of WordPress’ “Growing Blogs”. It states “these WordPress.com blogs gained the most popularity recently”.

Sounds pretty neat apart from the fact that there are 100 listed for today and I am at number 87! And, if you think WordPress names 100 a day for 365 days a year, that’s 36,500 per year or around one percent of all 3.5 million WordPress blogs.

But who’s complaining. Thanks WordPress.

A posting about Andy Murray’s Twitter is my most seached item – what’s that about?

Screengrab of Google following link from my WordPress dashboard

It was a normal posting. Tennis player Andy Murray’s Twitter goes dead! merely noted, on the 9 July, that the tennis player had stopped sending Tweets to his Twitter account after losing at Wimbledon.

If you are a blogger, you know this type of posting. You press save, then press publish and (secretly!) imagine that – celebrity! tennis! Wimbledon! Twitter! –  it is this very posting that will draw the crowds. But, of course, nothing happens.

Then this week, everything changed. The posting stormed in and dominated my WordPress dashboard all week. What’s that all about?

Murray is playing well this week at the St Petersburg Open which would explains some of the bounce on this blog – people will be looking him up on Google just as I have done for this blog. But the real reason, once I followed the stats on my WordPress dashboard, was to find that Google is now crediting this blog for a picture. Mmm, not quite right there.

Either way, the moral of the story/posting is this. You spend all week thinking of neat little subjects to cover in a blog. But it is the people, formerly known as the audience, who will make the final decisions as to what they read.